Senator Kutcher: According to the International Monetary Fund — and here I want to thank Senator Galvez’s office for the research — in 2019, Canada provided our coal industry subsidies worth over $7 billion. At the same time, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research received about $1.2 billion. This doesn’t make sense.

Masters-level graduate students who work in research labs make about $19,000 a year, and PhD students about $21,000 annually. As you know, the low-income cut-off for a single person in 2021 was just over $24,000. Does the government not think that investing in our best and brightest young researchers is as important as subsidizing our coal industry?